The Trade Deficit and Immigrants

Link: The Trade Deficit vs. Human Capital.

Given those assumptions, it follows that new foreign workers are bringing about $200 billion of human capital into the U.S. each year. True, this is a rough estimate -- further refinements could make that number quite a bit higher or lower. But what's important is that even as America is building up bigger foreign debts on the negative side of the national balance sheet, it's also building up bigger human capital assets on the positive side.

The benefits from immigrant human capital spread through the economy in diverse ways, not just on the corporate side. For example, the large number of immigrants partly accounts for the national housing market's strength in recent years.

This is really a neat point! It is also interesting to note that countries that are exporting capital to US (India, China etc.) are the same ones helping cause the huge trade deficits.